Wil Macaulay says -
>But any text within double quotes that _does_ start with one
>of those symbols can be safely used as an annotation, so IT IS NOW POSSIBLE
>to write an abc file that can be safely played by abc2midi (or BarFly, or
Muse) and
>properly displayed by abc2ps (or BarFly or Muse).
I seem to recall that during the debate on the sharps/flats version of the K:
command you said -
>if you write your abc/Noteworthy converter to use a version of abc
>that is not in the 1.6 standard (I'm not even talking about 1.7 extensions
here)
>you will be creating tunes that are not readable by abc2win, which is the
>most common abc platform for windows. Bad move.
I quite agree. Have you changed that advice?
>Here's where I really believe that you just "don't get it" - software DOESN'T
>produce abc, people do.
And guns don't kill people or perhaps an analogy closer to home would be
"Instruments don't make music, people do." But that doesn't absolve
instrument makers from responsibility for the quality of their instruments.
Musicians can make better music with better instruments.
>People will twist it to serve their own needs, if
>they don't have a good way to do it in the standard, and if those needs
>are seen as useful to multiple people they will get addressed, eventually.
There is a maxim in the commercial computer world that says "Don't start the
development until you've finished the design." Since this is almost never
observed it is cynically twisted to "Don't finish the development before
you've started the design." The latter seems to be policy in the abc
community.
Phil Taylor says -
>The problem here lies not with the proposed mechanism, but with the fact
>that the original (v1.5 abc) guitar chord format permitted abuse, and we
>can't go back in time and change it retrospectively.
I'm afraid he is right. Presumably guitar chords were originally seen as
simple text. We are stuck with the results but can't we learn from the
experience and try not to make the same sort of mistake again?
It sounds as if I won't be able to use Phil's transcription of the Goldberg
Variations. Can they really be said to be written in abc rather than in
BarFly output code?
Bryan
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